Published: 8/16/2016


I was missing Akihiko sorely by the time I reached my sixth week at the camp. Despite all of the people around me, life at Tatsumi River was an isolated one, and I did not appreciate this as much as I had initially. The other shinobi would hold polite conversation with me if I initiated it, of course, but I had not been terribly friendly with them when I'd first arrived at the camp. Added to that, I was a child. I was "taichou's little sister," to be precise. The potential for socialization was not impressive.

My next recourse would have been my brother, but Minato-nii was being overworked to the point that even his own upkeep was suffering. His sleep schedule was fairly nonexistent, and if he took his meals at all he had to take them on his feet. He would probably just collapse outright if I tried bothering him. And as for Itsuki-sensei, he was still hiding away. He wouldn't even come out to eat with us in the mess tent, and he still had no wish to see me, so I wasn't entertaining any delusions. There was no need to expect any company from him.

I was angry at first, but the feeling didn't last. The dam had cracked and the water had boiled, so to speak; it was only natural that evaporation followed. Even the burning resentment—to put me through all of that and refuse to even look at me, could that man call himself my sensei?—eventually hollowed out. He hadn't had a choice, and besides, when the two medics advised me not to push him past his comfort, the fear of cracking the fragile balance he'd managed to cobble together was so obvious in their counsel that it drained me of all my ire.

With nothing else to do, I trained. I was a ninja child, so I found some measure of consolation in the familiar routine of stretches and katas and meditations, but truthfully, it didn't amount to much. I was able to pass the time, but the days were no less lonesome. In fact, they were perhaps a little worse; when I did taijutsu, I would find myself remembering all of the mornings I spent practicing Hurricane Gale forms with Akihiko, and when I sat down to do chakra exercises, Yoshiya's voice would resound endlessly in my head, reciting Yamano-sensei's treatises.

An insatiable longing began to fill the hollow space.

But eventually, after six weeks of solo katas and restless meditations, the order to return home came. Never had there been more welcome news. It would be lifetimes too soon if I ever returned to this wretched place. The other shinobi were glad for it, too; they had already been here at Tatsumi River for half a year, and some of them even longer than that.

Despite his sleep deprivation, life suddenly seemed to flow back into Minato. He carried me on his back all the way to Konoha with a lively spring in his step, and a soft grin was forever creeping around the corner of his mouth. When we broke for camp, he would sit by the fire, pull out a square of cardstock with curling edges, and stare at until he went to sleep. It was easy to see who he was thinking of.

I began thinking of people, too. I thought of my cousins and my aunt and my uncle, and then again of Akihiko. A month was a long time to be away from a best friend, especially when he was a clansman who lived mere houses away. It was the first time since I'd met him that I'd gone so long without his company.

One best friend couldn't replace another, but I couldn't help but think that I would feel at least a little better when I got to see him again.


I saw Itsuki-sensei one more time before he disappeared from my life completely. We had to stand together when we reentered the village, since we were out on the same mission scroll. He shuffled more than he walked, and he stared at the ground instead of looking at me.

He was a different man. Healthy, sun-tanned skin and energetic eyes had given way to gauntness and distracted glances; his hair, normally neat in its holder, was loose and spilling all over his shoulders. Ken-san kept a firm hand on his arm for the whole of his interaction with the gate guards.

He didn't say anything to me. Ken-san met eyes with Minato, nodded, and walked away; Sensei followed after him in silence, still staring at the ground.

And that was all. I spent several silent moments staring at his back as it disappeared into the village streets, an indecipherable storm of emotions whipping about in my head.

Then there was a sudden blip of something. I turned to my right, feeling as though I had just been touched by a familiar sensation, and found Akihiko standing there in the dusky sunlight, eagerly scanning the crowd. Somehow he was nearly an inch taller than he'd been when I'd last seen him, and his hair had gotten longer. It was still standing in spikes at the top, but it was beginning to look a little shaggy in the back.

"Hey, welcome back!" His smile widened into a grin once he realized I'd spotted him. I felt a burst of utter gladness at the sight of it. "You were gone forever. Don't ever leave me behind like that again! If I have to suffer one more D-rank without you guys, I can't be held responsible for my actions!" He let out a hearty laugh and affectionately began slapping my back.

My warm reply died in my throat the moment his hand landed. Abruptly, the only thing I could think was that the red of his shirt looked quite keenly like the burnt sienna of Hatsuta's sleeve.

"Suzu?" Akihiko hesitated at my wide-eyed silence. He slowly withdrew his hand.

"Oh," I said, snapping back into reality. I offered him my best sheepish look. "Er, sorry. I spaced out for a second there."

"Are you okay?" he queried concernedly. I reached up, pinched the skin of my cheek between my fingers, and pulled as hard as I could. Then I let out the breath I hadn't known I'd been holding.

Right. Everything was fine. There was no need to freeze up.

"Yeah, for the most part," I assured him, conjuring up the best smile that I could. "I'm just… still recovering, that's all."

"What happened?" Akihiko asked with growing alarm. Suspicion began to form in his gaze. "Where's Sensei? And Yoshiya?"

"Sensei already left," I said, resisting the need to begin shuffling my feet. My teammate's gaze was piercing. "He… um… wasn't feeling all that great."

"Wasn't feeling all that great" was vastly understating the matter, but explaining exactly what had happened to Itsuki-sensei would be a whole issue of its own. It was a poor deflection, but I didn't feel up to tackling that right now at all.

The furrow in Akihiko's brow deepened; I doubt I succeeded in deceiving him at all, but he seemed content to let it go for now. His concern was elsewhere.

"Yoshiya?" he prompted, insistently. "Where is he?"

Yoshiya was in Minato's pack, sealed in a black scroll and sitting stacked alongside the rest of our fallen comrades. My mouth went dry.

"He's not here," I whispered, lowering my gaze. "He's…"

Akihiko's hands fell to his sides. "He's—" he started, jaw falling open when I failed to complete my sentence. Inanely, I made the observation that he'd lost a tooth recently. "Is he—are you saying—"

Dead. The word floated up between us, unspoken, like some sort of hazy, black smoke. I bit my lip and began twisting my fingers together. And then, just once, I nodded.

"You're serious," Akihiko said, stunned. There was a long pause, and when he spoke again, there was a quiver in his voice. "You… he's… what happened?"

"They were intercepted before they could deliver the message," Minato explained for me, having been following the conversation silently until now. "The Iwa forces did a number on them. Yoshiya-kun didn't make it."

I gave him a grateful look for his assistance, but when Akihiko turned his gaze on my cousin, it was one of blank disbelief. A shadow of something passed behind Minato-nii's gaze, but it was gone before I could identify what it was.

"Akihiko-kun, right?" he asked, sinking into a crouch so they were eye-level. "I'll release the body to Hokage-sama and it'll be turned over to his family as soon as the debriefing is finished. We can't say much more until then, though. Are you all right with that?"

Akihiko stood mute for a long moment. Then, finally, he nodded his head.

"Why don't you stop by the House tomorrow, Akihiko-kun?" my brother proposed, offering a small smile as he stood again. "We'll be able to talk more then. You're more than welcome to come, right, Suzu?"

He looked to me. I looked back down at my feet. "Right," I mumbled, lifting my hand and fitting it into his. Minato wrapped his fingers around mine and turned back to Akihiko.

"...I will come by," my teammate finally muttered, speech stiff and uncomfortable. His unease was almost tangible. Then, before I could compose myself enough to say anything else, he turned and fled.

On that off-key note, my cousin and I set off for home. I spent the walk back to the House in dejected silence while Minato strode on beside me, quiet once more.

Even hand-in-hand, the trek felt unnaturally long.


He was no longer a minor, so Minato had moved out of the House some time ago, but he still slept over with some frequency. He ate here often, too, to the point that it could be said that the House was still more his home than his own apartment was. I was not at all surprised to find that Kushina had decided to wait here for his return than at his own residence.

That was not to say, though, that she did not surprise me. She surprised both of us. She was standing in the hall the second the words "We're home" left Minato-nii's lips, and in another she had a hand fisted in his collar. I gasped and flattened myself against the shoe cubbies to avoid her angry charge.

"You asshole!" she snarled, without preamble. "It's been weeks since I last heard from you! I thought you were dead! You never responded even though I wrote so many letters, and they were saying the Iwa-nin were still advancing, and they wouldn't tell me your status when I inquired because I wasn't family—"

"K-Kushina!" Minato yelped, throwing his hands up. "I'm sorry, I—communications were cut off, and I wasn't permitted to send personal correspondence once they were reestablished—"

"Apology not accepted, you heartless bastard!" Kushina cried and shoved him. I ducked under him as he fell and then scrambled out of the genkan, deciding that the whole of it might be considered a blast zone. "Do you think this isn't your fault? Do you still not get this? Do you know what it feels like to be told 'I'm sorry, but you're not permitted to his personal information if you're not a family relation' when I've spent over half a decade looking after you and worrying about your sorry ass?"

Minato woozily pulled himself upright, putting one hand on the wall to steady himself. "I'm sorry I made you worry, but you know I can't help village policies, Kushina…" he mumbled, shrinking a bit.

"Can't help it my ass!" the redhead yelled. And then, without any warning, she burst into tears. "Get a clue, you moron! I'm not telling you to change village policies! They wouldn't be an issue if you would finally just marry me already!"

Minato froze as if petrified. A deadly hush fell, and I caught sight of Auntie and Uncle slowly poking their heads out from behind the doorframe like they were a pair of backpackers gawking at a bear. Then Minato made a slight choking noise, prompting Kushina to let out a noise of frustration, sit down next to me, and begin wiping angrily at her face with her hands.

"Can you believe this man?" she asked me. "Is it even worth crying over this worthless milksop?"

"U-um…" I stuttered, glancing at the now-mortified Minato before sending a frantic look to my foster parents. Auntie Reiko's face immediately melted into sympathy, and Uncle Souhei shot her an annoyed look. I suddenly got the feeling that it had taken him a while to propose, too.

Flushing furiously, Minato spent a hapless moment inarticulately working his jaw, stammering and making flustered noises. For a moment, even I was hard-pressed to believe that he had just defeated an entire contingent of Iwa ninjas and was being hailed as a returning war hero. It was almost comical.

Despite the heavy tint of hero worship, I think that even back then I had begun to suspect that Minato, however skilled and shrewd, was a timorous person by nature. It didn't often show, since he was smart and he planned his moves carefully, but in matters of emotional intelligence, he tended to drop the ball. Even in—or perhaps especially in—his close relationships.

When I had been a teenager, I had often looked back at this moment and sneered. By then Kushina had told me the story of her and Minato's courtship, and it had contained cringeworthy amounts of dithering. Not on behalf of Kushina—she had been blessed with self-awareness from a young age, so she had known right away what she wanted—but of Minato, who had been a barrel of endless prevarication. I can only imagine how maddening it must have been for a straightforward person like Kushina to have a wishy-washy crush that flipped from unbearably romantic—swooping to the rescue like a shining knight in armor, complimenting her hair, carrying her like a princess—to unbearably awkward like he was a revolving door. There had even been a point when they'd been fourteen or so that he had gotten so embarrassed by his attraction to her that he had gone out of his way to avoid her as much as possible. For a teenage boy still squarely under the thumb of puberty, such embarrassment had perhaps been inevitable, but his reaction had been so extreme that it eventually convinced Kushina he'd come to hate her. That misunderstanding had nearly ended them, according to her.

Six years later saw her in a similar crisis. Ninjas have been in the habit of marrying young since the beginning of time, and now that they were the proper age, Kushina—along with no small number of her peers—had been expecting the man she loved to finally pop the question. But the proposal never came, and the war dragged on. Their assignments began forcing them to spend less and less time together, and Minato became more and more preoccupied as new responsibilities began piling themselves on his plate. Then, after vanishing for half a year, he stopped returning her letters. No one could deny it looked bad.

Uncharitably, one might call that "being strung along." I had certainly been lacking in charity back then, and had often spent my time privately deriding my cousin's lack of sensitivity. Of course, it would be several years until I got married myself, so I had had no idea. Not about the serious social—and even moral—implications that Minato had been weighing, nor about just how much it meant that, in that moment, he looked Kushina in the face and threw all those considerations away.

But that had been a different time. As for nine-year-old me, she had only been speechless when Minato pulled himself together and knelt in front of Kushina. She hadn't been thinking much of anything, really, when he cupped his hands around Kushina's and apologized with blistering, excruciating, visceral sincerity, "Forgive me, Kushina. I wasn't thinking of you. It was wrong of me. Very wrong."

Kushina hiccuped and met his gaze, still trying to glare. Then her puckered face dissolved into tears all over again.

"I thought I'd lost you," she wept, pressing her forehead against his knuckles. "They wouldn't tell me anything. Ojisan and obasan couldn't do anything. I thought you were gone."

"I'm sorry," Minato murmured, leaning forward and touching his head to hers. "It won't happen again, Kushina. You're right; I've put off making a decision for far too long."

His voice was filled with conviction. There was a beat. Then, slowly, Kushina lifted her head, looking like she scarcely believed.

"Kushina," Minato said, drawing back so he could look her in the eye, "would you marry me so I can make it right?"

Nine-year-old-me couldn't have grasped everything that those words said about the man called Minato Namikaze. Teenaged-me, either. But that was the nature of a human being's existence.


Between my homecoming, my brother's proposal, and my reunion with the rest of my cousins, I almost didn't get a chance to talk to my aunt and uncle. But after everything had settled down and meals had been eaten and welcome-homes had been given—after everyone had brushed their teeth and changed their clothes and finally gone to bed—I somehow found myself on an adult's hip again, arms looped around my aunt's neck. She was shaking as she put her cheek against my head.

I shook too. I even began to cry a bit, despite having been mostly dry-eyed for the past few weeks. In Auntie's arms I almost couldn't remember what being in the bunker had been like. She was almost enough to chase away the memory of it altogether.

"We thought we'd lost you, too," Uncle Souhei murmured, and I felt his fingers slide through my hair. "There was no word of anything at all. We thought that it was likely Minato would be all right, but we had no idea about you."

Auntie began to cry, too.


Akihiko arrived to find the House ablaze with activity. It went far beyond the already significant ruckus expected of a household of this size, but that was because preparations for a wedding were already underway. The actual marriage itself would only be a matter of adding Kushina's name to the family registry, but Auntie was adamant that there be some sort of ceremony, however small. The clan agreed, and well-wishers were pouring in at a constant rate to give their congratulations and offer their assistance.

"What?" Akihiko asked me after I'd managed to twist my way through the sudden sea of vases and flower stands that had managed to appear on our porch over the course of a single morning. It was no small task, and there was more than one collision.

"Minato-nii proposed to his girlfriend last night," I explained once I'd finally reached him, hopping on one foot and ruefully rubbing a stubbed toe. "People keep coming to give us stuff despite the fact that he technically doesn't even live here anymore."

"Last night?" my teammate repeated incredulously. "And all of this is already going on?"

"Well, you know Minato-nii is kind of famous now," I pointed out. "And he was already well-known in the clan before that. I guess news just travels fast."

"And… what? Are they getting married tomorrow or something?" he asked, aghast.

"No… they're doing it next week."

Disbelieving was the only word to describe Akihiko's face. For a moment, he could only stand in speechless astonishment. And then, very suddenly, he looked angry.

"Are you telling me that's the first thing he did after captaining the end of a six-month campaign?" he demanded hotly. "Has he even gone to report to the war council yet? Has he even turned over the bodies to the Hokage yet?"

I took an automatic step back, eyebrows shooting up at the acrimony in his voice. "He's doing it right now," I said, holding up my hands warily. "It was too late to report to the Hokage when we arrived yesterday, so he went first thing this morning."

"Oh," Akihiko said. Just as quickly as he had swelled up, he deflated, shoulders slumping. I slowly lowered my arms.

There was a long beat of silence. Then the sound of people laughing inside the house wafted through the open window, and I felt the need to lower my head.

"...Let's go somewhere else," my friend muttered, turning away.

After a few minutes of wandering we found ourselves sitting on the swing set in one of the village's tiny parks, kicking at the dirt without really trying to move.

"What happened?" Akihiko finally asked, dragging a heel across the sandy soil beneath us. I gripped the long metal links of my seat's chains and looked down at my lap.

"They ambushed us," I mumbled after a moment. "And they wanted to know what the message was. But Itsuki-sensei wouldn't tell them, so they beat me up and stuff… and then…" I paused. "...And then they were going to kill me, but Yoshiya got mad and told them to kill him instead. And that he'd be a hero if they did."

Akihiko went a long time without saying anything. When I looked up again, he was staring at his hands. They were half-bandaged, cut up and callused from training.

"...They beat you up?" he finally asked, turning his face to me once more.

"Yeah," I nodded uncomfortably. "They… broke my ribs and stuff. And stepped on them. And, um… choked me."

A look of horror formed on his face, and I ducked my chin, not wanting to see the pity when it appeared.

"The iryou-nin got to me as soon as we were found, though," I hastened to add. "It, uh, really sucked, but I got better pretty quickly."

There was silence in reply. I chanced a glance back at him and saw that the same furious look he had worn earlier. Uneasily, I wondered if I ought to consider that better or worse than pity.

"And Sensei?" Akihiko asked, jaw harshly set.

"I don't know, really," I confessed. "He didn't want to see me. But… he's in a bad way. I don't think… I don't think they're going to let him be our teacher anymore."

That was the reason why I'd been kept at Tatsumi River for so long, after all. He had been declared unfit for duty, and since no genin was allowed to lead a team, even a team made only of herself, I hadn't been allowed to make the trip back to Konoha alone. Not that I would have felt particularly confident doing so. I had all the orienteering skill of a drunken pet hamster.

Akihiko looked a little like he had expected something like this, though the resulting frown was still formidable. It was an ill-fitting expression for a boy whom I'd always seen smiling.

"What do you think they'll do with us?" he asked. "With Team 11?"

"They'll have to give us a new assignment," I said, and bit my lip. "Do you think they'll split us up?"

Akihiko's response to that was to give the ground a rather sharp kick. His swing jerked backwards and began wobbling violently. Frown deepening, he planted both of his feet in the sand to still himself.

That about summed up my feelings on the matter as well. I pushed down a wave of bitterness. Team 11 wouldn't be needing a reassignment if it hadn't been given a mission that was so horrendously above its paygrade. Those men behind the missions desk were the reason Yoshiya was gone in the first place.

And they'd given such little thought about it. They gave such little thought to everything. They only thing they were concerned about was getting the assignments out. I knew deep down that I couldn't really blame them, though. They were only doing their jobs, and they were being forced into work that they hadn't been prepared for, either. They'd once been ordinary chuunin, Academy instructors and regular worker bees, with no training in war tactics or logistics beyond what they'd learned from their own days in the Academy.

But despite it all I still couldn't forgive their negligence. It had been war and they had been without guidance, but that was a bitterly cold comfort when Yoshiya had come home in a body bag because of them.


It was with great displeasure that, a week and a half later, we found ourselves meeting with same dispatcher who had threatened Itsuki-sensei to take the mission. When he received Team 11 for the summons and found half of it missing, it took several seconds for him to find his tongue again.

"Where are the rest of you?" he asked us blankly, gathering himself.

"Gone," was the glacial reply. We had wondered if Itsuki-sensei would appear at this meeting, but neither of us were surprised to find that he wasn't here.

"Even the kid?" The dispatcher's eyebrows rose.

"Funeral was last Friday," Akihiko informed shortly. The man behind the desk took on a look of dismay.

"Is that so?" he asked, grimacing. "So it ended in a shitshow after all."

"Yes, thank you for that," I scowled at his flippancy. "I did so enjoy taking a sabbatical in an Iwa bunker."

"Got a mouth on you, don't you, girl?" the dispatcher returned, looking like he was holding back a scowl of his own. "Don't blame me. The order came from above." Then, before I could snark off a reply, he looked over his shoulder and yelled, "Why are are these two here? I can't give anything to two genin on their own! They need reassignment!"

"You're supposed to do it!" a haggard-looking young man, seated on the floor, called back from behind a massive tower of paper. I could make out the bags under his eyes even at this distance.

"What?" The dispatcher paled. "That's not—I don't have that authority!"

"Wartime Operations Act, section 7E! You do!"

"You're kidding," the dispatcher groaned, dropping his head into his hands. "They're pushing even this stuff onto me?..."

Though he grumbled with his palm half on his face, he reached into a drawer and began rummaging around. Eventually he produced a binder and began flipping through it at rapid speeds. His brow furrowed more and more the closer he got to the end, and when he reached the back cover, he actually went back to the beginning and went through it again, taking the time to be more thorough.

"We don't have any jounin-sensei left," he whispered, disbelieving, once he'd completed the second circuit. "You can't be serious."

Despite its low volume, this announcement had people all around us turning to look at the dispatcher with disbelief.

"What?" a woman seated a few chairs away from him got up. "Did you just say there are no jounin-sensei left? That's impossible."

"Look!" the man snapped, and began going through the binder again. "WIA, KIA, KIA, squad full, WIA, KIA, WIA… they're all dead, injured, or they've already got teams!"

Akihiko and I glanced at each other as the Missions Office burst into clamor. The whole bloc of people working by the windows pulled out scrolls and began writing at once, speaking softly but urgently to each other under their breaths. The two clients waiting closest to the door outside, poor souls, nearly jumped into the ceiling when the previously calm room of intensely-focused ninjas exploded with chatter.

The dispatcher tangled a hand in his hair.

"We can't use the chuunin to teach," he began muttering to himself, reaching down and pulling out another, thicker binder. "Will they take genin in their squads? But the only open teams are the eight-man-cells…"

We looked on in silence as the man turned pages, muttered more, and began to despair. Then, out of nowhere, the woman who had spoken earlier said, "Promote them."

"What?" Akihiko and I were decidedly not silent at that. The dispatcher echoed us, turning to her with a look of utter incredulity.

"Promote them? Are you insane?" he demanded. "They graduated six months ago!"

"The issue is just that genin aren't allowed to take missions without someone of a higher rank supervising them, right?" the lady reasoned. "Just promote them and register their group status as 'partnered' so they don't get sucked into the eight-mans that deploy to the war front. Then just have them do co-ops with other teams. Easy."

"Are we even allowed to do that?"

"Wartime Operations Act section 7F, clause 4," the sleep-deprived chuunin muttered, still working through his papers like a zombie.

"It's fine," the woman urged as the dispatcher pulled out a third binder and began flipping through it with a doubtful look. Once I caught sight of the photo inserts on the pages, I realized it the General Forces' registry.

"...They're covered in commendations," he said after a moment of scanning our pages, hesitatingly. Akihiko immediately blew up.

"Are you trying to get us killed?" he snarled, slamming his hands onto the desk. "First you send our team to the front lines, and now you want to asspull promote us? Do we look like cannon fodder to you?"

"Akihiko," I hissed. Though I wouldn't mind smashing some desks in myself, the last thing we needed to do was piss off a man who could potentially ruin our lives. "It's the court-martial guy. Shut up before he decides to indict you."

The dispatcher favored me with a withering look, but at least he didn't immediately decide to send us off to the border.

"Hey, not bad, kids," the woman commented, peering at our profiles. "You know, if they were still on, you probably would've been in the Chuunin Exams anyway."

Despite myself, I felt a hot flash of temper, and Akihiko and I shot her synchronized death glares. If this was going to happen, we both knew, we had this person to thank.

"Enough, you two," the dispatcher cut in sharply, before anything else could be said. "Look, you don't like the idea and I get it. You came back from a bad mission and you're hurt and you're missing your teammate. But Konoha's military strength is declining at a rate faster than anyone has ever seen. Do you really think you have to luxury to pick and choose where you can go?"

"Didn't Shodaime-sama found this village so people would stop sending children off to their deaths?" Akihiko shot back contemptuously, and I was briefly reminded that he was something of a history buff, at least where wars and famous shinobi were concerned. "A fat lot of good you're doing for all that."

"You're not children, you're ninjas," the dispatcher snapped in reply. "In the end you belong to the village, and right now, we're at war. There's no time to waste coddling you."

Akihiko made to open his mouth, but I grabbed his arm and interrupted tightly, "You're right. We're ninjas. We'll do what we have to." To my teammate, I said quietly, "Don't do anything stupid. I'm on the line here, too."

Akihiko eventually backed down, though he made no attempt to hide his scorn. The dispatcher hmpthed loudly and set out a blank scroll, which he proceeded to fill out and stamp with an official seal.

"Here," he said, holding it out to me. "Take it to the Tower to change your IDs and get your vests. And if you need a mission later, come back after eleven. My shift'll be over by then."

I took it with a pinched expression. "Gladly," I replied.

The dispatcher's hand twitched, and I wondered if he was resisting the urge to flip us off. Akihiko certainly looked like he was ready to give him the finger.

"Let's go," I muttered, turning on my heel.


A/N: Sorry for the long wait, guys! My summer job got kind of hectic, and then my sleep schedule went way out of whack, and a bunch of other things happened. This chapter's longer than usual, though, so there's that! Granted, it's choppier, too, but I suppose that's what happens when you can only write a few disjointed paragraphs at a time over a course of a month and a half.

Enjoy! Sorry for any typos that appear.

Cheers,

Eiruiel


Notes:

1. "The Missions Office"... "The whole bloc of people"... "The two clients standing closest to the door outside"

Though the Missions Desk in Naruto is portrayed as been in a huge empty room, I really find myself doubting that such a huge piece of Academy real estate was set aside for one tiny row of chairs. I also doubt a Hidden Village as big as Konoha could assign all its missions from a single counter manned by a small handful of people. Thus, the Missions Office is full of administrative chuunin hard at work.

The concept of clients waiting outside to be seen comes from Tazuna's introduction at the beginning of the Land of Waves arc. Also, the idea that paranoid intel-hoarding shinobi would strive to keep civilians from hovering around in a room full of sensitive information.

2. "Wartime Operations Act, section 7E!'"

I never felt that the slipshod nature of the wartime promotions were portrayed well in the previous draft of Glory, and I wanted to try making a point of how the war has made all sorts of otherwise unthinkable "shortcuts" commonplace. Hopefully, between this, Suzu's comments on the rush-job educations at the Academy, and Itsuki's status as an "oh-shit" (or, as Akihiko would phrase it, "asspulled") jounin, I've done a better job.

3. "They'd once been ordinary chuunin, Academy instructors and regular worker bees, with no training in war tactics or logistics beyond what they'd learned from their own days in the Academy."

By the time Iruka gets behind that desk, though, there'll have been policy reforms, along with other things that Suzu alluded to in an earlier chapter.